Beautiful Scars

by Tom Wilson

  I wonder what kind of life we all would have had if we’d known who we were. What kind of people we would have been if the lock and key were tossed away, if our roles were defined and our hearts were free. If we had been allowed to make the mistakes, to love and be loved on our own terms.

  Janie has a busy life. She has a job counting communion dollars at her church. She and her sister Millie join seniors groups and friends and go on day trips to Niagara-on-the-Lake, St. George and in and around Hamilton. She has doctor and hair appointments. She and Millie share an apartment, and Janie takes on a lot of the domestic duties. Once Janie makes plans, that’s that—she sticks to them like they’re the word of the Lord Jesus himself. She’ll respectfully blow off a family gathering if she has something on the go. This can sometimes lead to hurt feelings, including my own, but I admire her determination and I’m happy she keeps busy, keeps moving. That’s how she’s been all her life; it’s how she survives.

  I drive Janie around town to help her with her errands and it’s on these occasions that we get to catch up. When I say “catch up,” I mean fill in the massive gaps of information missing from our story: my story, and her story before me. Once in my car, Janie is mild-mannered and polite as always. She proceeds cautiously. As though reading from a script, she speaks about growing up on the reserve, about her mom and dad and her journey to Toronto, about Bunny and George and the day I was born. I usually don’t have to ask the first question and I never challenge the details. I just accept what she says because I know life has been hard on her and that reliving it—saying it out loud—is harder still.

  My minivan is her confessional and I’m her priest. Janie trusts me and knows I’m interested in her story. All of it. Every detail is like a colour filling in a blank space on our canvas. Janie wants me in on “our” history. Maybe she’s been waiting a lifetime to explain how our lives came to be sealed up tight in different envelopes.

  We have a limited amount of time between the front door of her apartment and Fortinos grocery store, Lime Ridge Mall or Ikea, but I keep my ears open and try to remember the details and the characters she tells me about. My story comes from Janie’s side of the street only, and that’s good enough for me. She has opinions. She has facts. She has the key to so many doors, and often she has tears to accompany her words.

  —

  The River-View in Chateauguay was the Mohawk hang. The air in the place was filled with smoke and sweat, fists, laughter and lies, and Ernest Tubb and Buddy Holly on the jukebox and the booze going down hard. Reserve buddies with their New York State plates gathered there nightly. They swaggered and strutted and flirted like great brown-skinned giants. Skywalkers and lacrosse stars and Mohawk con men, gangsters, warriors—players all of them, showing off some Mohawk handsome. Just how handsome can a human being be? Mohawk handsome, that’s how.

  Women swooned across the dance floor and out the back door of the bar, their skirts magically flying over their heads, their panties dropping and their bras coming undone in a swirl of high-heeled drunken passion. I can’t imagine how many kids were conceived in the back seats of the cars that tore out of the River-View parking lot at closing time, out onto dirt roads that ended in some field wet with dew from the damp summer night, and lit by blue rays of the holier than holy Quebec moonlight.

  Eighteen-year-old Janie took what she had down the road to Chateauguay one night with the hope that she could just keep on going. She went to the River-View to try to kill her demons, to figure herself out and get away from her home and family and feel a part of the world. Thirty-something Rudy West was at the River-View the night Janie and her friend stepped through the front door and into the thick barroom air. He beelined over to Janie and said the things she wanted to hear. She knocked back his free drinks and sucked back his words and smiled and spun around the dance floor.

  They ended up running off to get married.

  “How long had you known him before you ran off to New York? A few weeks or so?” I asked.

  “Oh, no, no. It was more like a few hours. We left right from the River-View that night.”

  “What?” I couldn’t stop laughing. I always thought I was the wild-hearted rounder in the family.

  Janie had nothing to lose. She was ready to take whatever chances she needed to take to get out. They drove straight through the reserve and disappeared in the shadows between the trees. They skidded along the backroads through Saint-Rémi, Saint-Michel, Saint-Édouard, Sherrington, over the border and down into Champlain, Vermont, and out into the unprotected wilds of America. She’d never been over the border. She’d never been this far from home on her own. They had a clear path straight down the spine of the state towards New York City, where West worked up in the sky during the week.

  They wound through the streets, and he took them down to the south end of the island to stay in a hotel on the Bowery. He was playing the little big man, full of bluster and promises. He talked of getting married and of setting Janie up in an apartment.

  They left Manhattan and headed over the East River to State Street into the heart of Little Caughnawaga. The ten square blocks housed the working men and the families that migrated down from Kahnawake to build the iconic New York skyline, its bridges, its monuments to modernity.

  So many familiar faces, some Janie had not seen in years, the faces of her neighbours and family in Quebec. But those who had been in Brooklyn for a while, some who had been born there, spoke in a Flatbush accent. Mohawk was the native tongue in that little ten-block area. It was spoken in the bars and on the job sites, but a lot of parents spoke only English to their kids, a trickle-down effect of residential schools, where the language of their ancestors had been punched out of them.

  They poured out of three-storey walk-ups and into the streets, flooding the sidewalks, the grocery stores and the famous Mohawk watering hole the Pow Wow. West took Janie there to show her off. He was reckless and the locals took notice. Word was spreading about the Lazare girl, the daughter of Chief John Lazare himself, who had suddenly disappeared from the River-View. The same eyes and ears that spread word and kept secrets back home in Quebec were kept open on one another in Brooklyn.

  Janie was getting restless. She’d escaped the reserve and was in one of the world’s great cities, but she was stuck with ol’ Rudy West poking at her, crowding her and showing her off. She must have felt sick about her misjudgment, but she was saved somewhere into the second week of her time in Brooklyn. From back in Kahnawake, West’s mother called him up and told him firm, fast and straight that word had spread, the family was looking for their daughter and he’d better send Janie back right now.

  Janie watched West’s coolness melt away as she listened to his mother reprimanding him over the phone. John Lazare was angry and was going to send people out to find her, drag her home and maybe leave him floating in the East River. He hung up the phone, turned to Janie and said, “You gotta go home.” And then he said, “Anyway, I’m a married man.”

  Janie said, “What? You’re a married man? You didn’t tell me that, you told me you were free.”

  He said, “I had plans, I really did. I planned for you and me to get something going down here.”

  What he wanted was the classic routine of keeping two wives, two families in two households in two cities. Not much of a plan, but a fairly common situation for truckers and steelworkers and long-term migrants working away from the homestead.

  Janie said, “Well, I’m going home right now.” He got her ticket and he brought her to the bus depot on 42nd Street in Manhattan. She’d had a taste of what a young girl craves—bright lights, big city—but how humiliated and defeated she must have been. She showed her face among the ironworkers and their families in Brooklyn, and the word burned up the telephone wires, sizzled north and all the way back home.

  Sitting at the back of a Greyhound bus edging up the west side of Manhattan and along the Hudson, she watched the city bounce off her window and into eternity. She looked out at N
ew York City for the last time, for the last time in her life, devastated as she prepared for the hard fist of judgment to come down on her when she skulked back to Quebec, a foolish teenager who’d bought into the empty promises of a married man, a pregnant eighteen-year-old as desperate as she could be.

  MOHAWK LEGENDS

  You can’t fool kids. Especially not the mouthy fists-first, piss-and-spit Hamilton kids who told me straight out that I looked like an Indian. I was called a wahoo, a chief and a savage. Later the insults became uglier: “You big ugly fuckin’ Indian.” In gym class, kids put two fingers behind their heads as feathers, and they slapped their hands against their mouths going “Awe-wa-wa-wa…Awe-wa-wa-wa-wa,” dancing around me in old cartoon style. I asked Bunny if I had Indian blood. She told me to stop being so foolish. “How could you ask such a question in front of your father who fought in the war and got blinded, just to come home and face a question like this?”

  Turns out you really can’t fool kids. I am a Mohawk. The son of a skywalker. From Janie’s story, I knew just enough about Rudy West to research him online. I discovered that he was already dead. Good, I thought, fuck him. I would never know him, but I did know John Lazare, and through him was connected to the legends of my Mohawk ancestors.

  I used to spend some Christmases at John Lazare’s house. He was Uncle John to me then. He’d pull money from behind my ears like a grandfather would. He told me his stories. He was an immaculately dressed man and always kept his shoes polished and neatly lined up on the staircase in his home. One morning, Janie noticed that all his left shoes were missing from the staircase order. They were gathered in a pile at the bottom of the stairs, as if a hand from the underworld had taken them all out. Later that same day a pickup rammed into the oil-delivery truck John was unloading. As a result of the accident, his left leg was amputated. Whenever I saw him he’d get me to punch his wooden leg so my knuckles hurt.

  He told me that, one night, walking across the Mercier Bridge after work in Lasalle, he noticed a ball of fire dancing on the water below him. He thought he was seeing things. He got closer until he was standing on the bridge directly above the fireball. He was certain what he saw was real. So certain that he went straight home and told his father.

  His father, Peter Lazare, explained it was a premonition. The fire of a burning soul. The soul of someone who was not dead yet. He told his son to return to the river the next night to see if the ball of fire would reappear.

  John went back to the river and stood under the Mercier Bridge. He saw a barge and police and a crane pulling a car out of the river. He looked up to where he had been standing the night before and saw the guard rail was broken. A car had sped through it and down into the cold Saint Lawrence River.

  I remember John Lazare told this story with unbreakable concentration; it had obviously affected him deeply. Even then I was honoured that he would share it with me. Now I know it was my grandfather who told me the story as part of a Mohawk tradition of passing on the legends of our ancestors and our community.

  When I was growing up, John’s brother Sonny Lazare was a living legend to me. He was an ironworker, one of the wild daredevils who rolled with the clouds and swung from the stars. People thought the skywalkers were fearless, but they were just as afraid of falling as the next guy. They just didn’t talk about it. Under the Quebec bridge on the eastern side there’s a steel cross erected in memory of the men who fell to their deaths when the bridge collapsed in 1907. Thirty-three men from Kahnawake died working on that bridge. After that, the women got together and told the men they didn’t want such a large group of Mohawk men working together on one job ever again. But time passed, and the men did what they felt they needed to do.

  Every Sunday the men ate their dinner at six and were in bed at seven p.m. At midnight they were up again, and while their families slept, they’d stumble into cars with four other guys and hit the road. The weekly drives back to New York were like high-speed funeral processions, with the passengers sitting mouths agape, heads bowed into chests, while the driver made the five-hour journey. They were sleeping cars, and when everyone woke up, they were in Brooklyn, just in time for work.

  Sonny Lazare was an ironworker in Detroit. His name was often mentioned in Bunny’s kitchen during long-distance phone calls or in conversations at the table with Janie. In fact, news from “back home” was at the centre of most conversations when I was a kid. I’d sit under the kitchen table playing with Dinky and Matchbox cars while the tales rolled out. I heard the many theories discussed about the murder of wrestler Don Eagle, an American Wrestling Association champ. The news reported a single self-inflicted gunshot wound to his head. My kitchen experts thought the mob had killed Don Eagle, or that his wife, Jean, had. It was said that she had suffered one beating too many at the hands of Eagle. She mysteriously disappeared to Florida, where she was murdered and burned in a torched car and later found by a chief of Kahnawake.

  I was quiet while they spoke, chilled by the details of the torched car, burned body and wrestling star. I imagined it as an episode of The Twilight Zone, the headlines bold in black and white. The mystic reserve and its secrets captured my imagination by the time I was five or six years old. The world Janie and Bunny talked about was thousands of dark nights away from mine on East 36th Street, but the stories got inside me. I swear I walked those dirt roads in my dreams, in visions just before the voices in the kitchen faded to black and my mind dropped into the sleep hole. Down into a world of shape-shifters, dogs and men chasing me, and hoofed women calling out to me, where I was led by my ancestors through the trees. I was safe in those visions, protected and guided from danger by a great bear that I felt behind me at all times. I stood there looking up at car crashes on the Mercier Bridge, the midnight trains blowing their tops and rattling the town’s windows as they passed. I rode to safety on the backs of giant turtles that turned into relatives, and ghosts that showed themselves to remind me where I was going and where I was from, and the Saint Lawrence Seaway screamed as it rushed past.

  ON THE DAY I WAS BORN

  It was embarrassing for the family. John Lazare was a strict man and it was shameful to have a daughter who was that young, unmarried and pregnant. They were all Catholics, after all. Janie had to be kept out of sight. She was forced to stay across the highway, off the reserve, until John could figure out what to do with her. She was eventually told she’d have to leave. They shipped her out under the cover of night to Bunny and George Wilson’s in Hamilton. Back to the people who took her in during times of sickness. She got on a train and said goodbye to her home and family again and headed west to Southern Ontario.

  On the morning I was born, the hot sun bloomed along the Niagara Escarpment and the first colours of the day rolled down the Jolley Cut, filling the streets of Hamilton like a blood-soaked towel. I left the pain and sadness of my mother’s body and entered the June day in the coolness of the Catholic hospital. Saint Joseph had received me, and my mother was alone, broken-hearted, and not sure what was going to happen next. The hardest part was over. The hardest part had just begun.

  She was told that she couldn’t be a mother, that she didn’t know how. She was riding on the rim of a mental breakdown. She was sedated and kept behind hospital doors for observation, and by the time she got out I was in a Catholic-services orphan nursery where I would start my life cared for by nuns among the other unwanted babies. The babies of drunken, careless lovers, mental patients, rape victims and underage girls who were looking for a lucky break or a second chance.

  A few months later the Millers, who had two children of their own, scooped me up to bring me into their home near Fennell Square. My life was set. I am told the Millers loved me. They wanted to adopt me, make me a Miller.

  None of this was going down well back home in Kahnawake. John Lazare and his brother Sonny didn’t like the idea of one of theirs being raised outside the family, off the reserve, by people they didn’t know. Sonny, already the father of seven c
hildren, suggested he and his wife, Hazel, would take me in.

  John rolled into town in his Buick Riviera. He drove straight to Bunny and George’s midtown apartment where Janie was living. He announced that he was here to take his grandson back and demanded to know where I was.

  Janie told her father I’d been chosen by a very nice family and that she had been to visit me and they were going to adopt me as soon as they were allowed. “Get those people on the phone and tell them we’re on our way. Make the arrangements,” John said to Bunny.

  Bunny made the call, and John and Janie got in his car and headed up the Jolley Cut to Concession Street and landed at the front door of the Millers. Janie said she’d changed her mind and no longer wanted to give her baby to them. So I was taken from the only family I’d known and brought back to Bunny and George’s apartment on Barnesdale Boulevard. And then Bunny Wilson made a decision. She did not want the baby taken up to the reserve, where Janie had been treated so badly. A doctor had told Bunny that Janie’s emotional state was so fragile that if she was any more broken-hearted she would die. Bunny told Janie and John that she and George would adopt me and Janie could stay with them too. The baby would be kept in the family, not raised by strangers, and so John agreed to the plan.

  Soon after, Bunny and George moved to the house on 36th Street with their young niece and their baby son Thomas Cunningham Wilson.

  “I tracked down the doctor who delivered me,” I tell Janie in the quiet of our confessional. “I asked him for my adoption papers and he told me there are none. I was never legally adopted. I was just signed over to Bunny and George, and the names on my birth certificate were changed from yours and Rudy West’s to Beatrice and George Wilson’s.”